These are the fish that were once again scaled and gutted right before my eyes in the Garifuna village of Santa Fe, and the soup that they became. The soup is called Tapado or Tapou and looks terrible but actually is delicious. It's made with bananas, platanos, and coconut.
The view from the street in Trujillo.
A waterfall near Lago de Yojoa (I don't actually have any pictures of the lake itself. Trust me, it looks like a big beautiful lake).
Iglesia Los Dolores in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a quick stopover before El Salvador.
Welcome to Perquin, El Salvador. It's a tiny town that mostly just has the Museum of the Revolucion, which commemorates the war in El Salvador from 1980-1992. But the town is nice, and I met some of the most sincere, intelligent people I have encountered on this trip. They are all ready to tell you their stories about the war and how it affected their families and the culture of El Salvador.
Mural in El Mozote, El Salvador. The town of El Mozote was completely, literally razed during the war. The government claimed there was a guerilla uprising in progress there, but it was a small town with families, not guerillas. So all the women, men and children were separated and systematically killed, and buried in mass graves. The houses were all bombed, and even the animals were killed. The rivers were all poisoned so that the fish died, a tactic known as "taking the water from the fish". Needless to say, there wasn't much of a town until recently, when people started moving back in. They still do not speak much about what happened, because the people that do that mysteriously disappear.
A memorial statue of a family in El Mozote. This stands over one of the mass graves.
A memorial wall listing the names and ages of the children murdered (the ones whose bodies were found). They ranged from one day to 6 years old. This is only a tiny piece of the wall; it goes on around the building.
A non-detonated bomb recovered near Perquin. It is a 500 pound bomb, manufactured by the USA and sold to the El Salvadoran government for the purpose of conquering the revolutionaries (soon to congregate as the FMLN) who were campesinos and indigenous people fighting for the land that was stolen from them. We also saw hundreds of guns and several aircraft also sold by the US to fund the war.
A collage of some of the faces of the "heroes and martyrs", as they are known, who fought against the government as part of the FMLN.
Ok...on a light note:
A turtle at my hostel in Leon, Nicaragua! There are a bunch of them that hang out by the little pond in the "sitting area".
Cathedral in Parque Central. The largest cathedral in Central America.
A lion outside the cathedral.
A scary statue of Jesus inside the largest cathedral...
A church in Leon.
Tomorrow I am going "volcano boarding", which involves hiking an active volcano and sledding down at 60km per hour on a linoleum board. If I survive, I will post some pictures of it. Next I am head to either Little Corn Island, off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, or Granada Nicaragua. I leave in 2 days for somewhere else, but as I've discovered, it's useless to make plans here, as they change on an hourly basis. They also depend on the Central American bus schedules, which are not the most reliable. Most buses leave "when full", so if no one else wants to go where I'm going, it takes me a while to get there!
Hasta entonces!
1 comment:
Hi Jess,
I just looked through all your posts from the trip, looks like you're having a blast. I'm more than a little jealous, makes work seem like a terrible thing.
Ben Dawes
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